In order to provide meaningful search results and other information to a user of a mobile wireless device, the location—or at least an approximate location—of that device needs to be identified. One can baseline the location estimate using GPS coordinates, but this may be problematic when there are not enough visible GPS satellites or the device is indoors. In addition, this approach may have a high latency while a GPS receiver acquires satellite signals, and may also suffer from a power drain due to high battery usage. Information about cellular networks and wireless access points may also be employed to obtain the location estimate. Here, resolving the location of a device may include accessing network-side databases that store geolocalized wireless network information including cellular tower and WiFi access point information. Such databases can be used to geocode scans of visible networks.
However, existing approaches may require multiple requests and responses between the mobile device and the network. For instance, a first request may involve resolving a location from a network scan, and a second request may be done to perform the actual search or other query using the resolved location from the first request. This can cause an unnecessary delay and consumption of network (and client device) resources. And for queries that are time sensitive, forgoing a location estimate can provide responses not relevant to the user's actual location.